

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
Aikido Security caught a critical remote code execution vulnerability in my Python machine learning pipelines before it reached production.
Since we got rid of that, our productivity has increased, I believe, by thirty-two percent.
We were expecting to complete the compliance in a month, but I figured out Aikido Security could do it within a week for all our 13 repositories.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Aikido Security was the easiest to use, the easiest to onboard, and the one with the most active customer support.
Their team proactively reached out after signup to ensure we were set up correctly.
Customer support is good; if you raise a query, hardly within a day, your issues get resolved.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
That kind of reliability becomes invisible when it works well, which is exactly what you want from a security tool running in your CI/CD pipelines.
Aikido Security scales well by supporting multiple projects, repositories, and development teams on a single platform.
You can deploy it on your team, and if you have a large team, it works very well.
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
The platform has been reliable and provides accurate security findings.
It remains stable even when generating a large amount of code.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
I would love to see a Terraform module for Aikido Security.
I had a certain object with a UUID that was being considered as a private secret key or API key, which was not the case.
Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.
Another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients.
I used the free trial, which was sufficient for evaluating the platform and its core features.
Aikido Security has a plan for $4,200 annually for up to 10 users.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is reasonable and based on the repository; they charge accordingly.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
We were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had.
Security shifted left, meaning issues were caught during development rather than after deployment.
My favorite feature is the dependency vulnerability scanning because it quickly identifies the risk in third-party packages, which saves me time in finding vulnerabilities.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 3.9% |
| Aikido Security | 0.4% |
| Other | 95.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 16 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
Aikido Security is the no-nonsense platform that empowers developers by centralizing code-to-cloud security issues and providing rapid guidance for fixing vulnerabilities.
With over 6,000 teams utilizing its features, Aikido Security prioritizes effective security management by consolidating 11 comprehensive scans into one platform. This approach translates complex vulnerabilities into understandable insights, targeting non-enterprise SaaS businesses with engineering teams of 10-500 developers. It focuses on delivering security management without excessive costs or complexity through a product-led growth model.
What are the standout features of Aikido Security?In industries like software development and cloud services, Aikido Security is implemented to provide clear insights, enabling teams to focus on rapid product growth while maintaining robust security. Its product-led growth strategy, including a freemium offering, allows developers to experience benefits firsthand without initial investment.
F5 Advanced WAF delivers robust web security with features like signature-based threat protection and behavior analysis, ensuring app stability and security.
F5 Advanced WAF integrates advanced security with functionalities such as SQL injection defense and real-time threat intelligence. It enhances security for applications with load balancing, bot detection, and DDoS protection alongside comprehensive attack monitoring capabilities. Popular among diverse sectors, its usability and easy integration make it a practical choice by providing a stable security infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments.
What are the key features?Particularly relevant in banking and financial services, F5 Advanced WAF safeguards applications from threats like SQL injections and DDoS attacks, ensuring compliance and API security. Its capabilities are leveraged for both load balancing and application defense, offering a versatile deployment model suited for protecting critical infrastructure in competitive and demanding industries.
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